Alllll those missiles aimed at one tiny little fearful head! Maybe they’re just in her imagination. They’re certainly an overreaction! But isn’t that the point of nuclear weapons? To be something too dire to use. Right?

If those nuclear-tipped swords are real, then we’ll just have to hope that *something* survives. Maybe something will crawl out of that nearly-empty soda bottle and mutate until it rules the world. It won’t be a wasteland for as long as the popular imagination would have it be; the irradiated exclusion zone around Chernobyl is a lovely green place – until you turn on your Geiger counter and hear it going wild.

Ultimately, you can’t live under the shadow of a doom like that and stay sane. Or can you? Nuclear apocalypse has fallen out of style as a threat. It’s still out there, but it’s not dominating the discourse like it did when the US and the USSR were staring each other down. It’s become a joke.

Some things are too huge to take seriously.